It has been a couple days since the attempted invasion of Icarus' mind. During that time no fewer than three raids were attempted on the ice cream freezer. Sadly, the twins whom have an amazing ability to show up behind someone out of seemingly nowhere thwarted them each time. But all was not lost; they felt bad for the 'hapless' hunters, so gave them ice cream each time anyway. But all cannot be ice cream and sweets. Thoughts return to how to deal with the obnoxious and seemingly always imminent threat of Von Bronson ... and that leads back to the large laboratory where items can be experimented with and tactics improved upon. Nothing quite says laboratory like explosion-proof shields.
"Maybe some day I'll actually be useful," grouses a finally-clothed Icarus with his hands dutifully stuffed into his pockets like any self-respecting teenager. He even slouches while he walks, at that. "I just can't sustain any gravity fields for very long before I feel more and more tired."
"That is because your body doesn't handle energy transfer efficiently," Morpheus notes as he follows. "Well, I should say that your organic body doesn't. It is efficient for metabolic processes, but not for raw energy generation at an atomic level; it cannot supply enough material to break down fast enough for the proper subatomics. But, it is still theoretically possible to improve upon and supplime ..." The other artificial creation stops there and shakes his head, adding, "But being good at damaging things that way shouldn't be the reason to learn it. Creating is harder than destroying, you should aspire to that instead."
Envoy sits in a chair, listening for changes in the pitch of people's voices.. or sudden red-shifts in color. She's been trying to maintain a low-level field while feeding the necessary Higgs-manipulation equations to her own crystal network. It isn't exactly a speedy process. "Power isn't everything," she notes to Icarus. "You have very fine control which is more useful."
"Yes, I will be able to deftly pluck nose hairs at a mile," Icarus grouses, crossing his arms.
"Making the enemy sneeze at the right moment could be pretty advantageous," Envoy notes, taking the boy's comment seriously at first.
Both Icarus and Morpheus give Envoy a rather odd look. "I think that was an attempt at humor," Morpheus explains. "Granted your observation is technically accurate, but it is not quite the intention of the comment."
"Forgive me, I'm at the limits of my conscious processing power," Envoy notes, frowning a little. "Can't do much about that without Probe."
"Well, go get it, then," Icarus says.
"I already did, but decided it wasn't worth the cost to others," the Aeolun explains. "I suspect awakening the Leviathan might do it. Right now it's just me and Child and.." she trails off.
"And what?" Icarus prods. "Where is it?"
Envoy gives the teenager an annoyed look. "And one other, maybe. The reason I have all these.. aspects.. is because I chose to lock away part of myself. A part that I don't want to have anything to do with. The real Dragon."
"What other?" Icarus presses and crosses his arms. "You rooted around in my head," he points out.
"True, you did," Morpheus has to agree.
"That's not the same as rooting around in my head," Envoy claims. "You know how nasty one of your creators was, Icarus. And you can probably say the same, Morpheus. Do you want to emulate them, even a little?"
"Just because my creator was a jerk doesn't mean I am," Icarus points out. "He didn't program me with anything; didn't have the chance."
"I don't remember much about mine," Morpheus notes.
"I don't know what my mothers programmed me to do," Envoy says. "That's why I keep that part hidden from myself. I'm not a puppet anymore."
"Maybe you should find out so you're not afraid of it anymore," Icarus suggests as he shrugs lightly.
"To quote many dreamers; how can you face demons without if you won't face demons within," Morpheus opines.
"It's.. I don't want you to be afraid of me, Icarus," Envoy says, a bit more softly. "I don't want anyone to be afraid of me. And I don't want those who claim I'm a monster to be right. Now... have you been monitoring my field for anything unusual?"
"Nope. Was I supposed to be?" Icarus asks as he picks up some gadget from the table. He juggles it a few times single handed, then it stops in mid-air and comes apart into about two dozen smaller parts that all float out in space in front of him.
"You should always try to be aware of what's going on around you," Envoy says. "Every time we deal with Dr. von Bronson's creations, they seemed to have learned from what we've done before. This time, we have to be able to beat them before they have the chance to copy us."
Icarus rolls his fingers a bit and makes all the parts dance and shift about in the air before him like an exploded three dimensional model. "Yeah, I guess, but you don't do anything that complicated," the construct claims. "Yours all make sense, so I don't have to concentrate on it. Theirs are all noodles and wet towels. Jumbled weirdness."
"Noodles.. and wet towels?" Envoy asks, blinking three times.
"Things that don't make sense together," Icarus tries to clarify.
"I think he alludes to the old comment about if you have enough animals beating on printing machines eventually you get something that makes sense, but there isn't any plan behind it," Morpheus offers.
"Hmmm.. like herding cats.." Envoy mutters. "That.. is very useful, I think. There's a limit on how many crystal implants one of the cyborgs can have then, before the noise washes out any chance of a signal. That's why he's just kept throwing more at us instead of making them actually perform better."
"I feel bad for them. To be like ... that," Icarus says quietly as the parts orbit him like a miniature solar system. "I know how it feels to me when I push things and to have that much chaos going on ... it has to be agony. How can someone do that to another being?"
"If can introduce more noise to their systems, it might incapacitate them.. I just don't see how to do that at the moment.." she concludes with a sigh.
Morpheus eyes Envoy for a moment. "You of all people should know of a way," he remarks with a sigh and a smile. "How disappointing; you're acting so ... mortal. I could suggest something, or I could give you a hint."
Envoy frowns at Morpheus. "I'm trying to think and construct a holographic interference pattern that will filter out all but one percent of Higgs field interactions within my sphere. I have a limit of one impossible task at a time right now."
Morpheus chuckles, shaking his head. The construct goes about the lab and picks up a tube and two tuning forks. Well, they look like tuning forks anyway. The tube he sets on the table and both forks he strikes so that they ring at the same frequency. Then ... he sticks one in each end of the tube. It takes him a minute or two of fiddling, then the whole tube and half the things on the table start vibrating like mad. "There is your clue as to one possible way," he offers.
"How can I find a chaotic harmonic?" Envoy asks, then blinks. "Maybe not chaotic.. but a fractal permutation might work. Chaos isn't really chaos at a fundamental level.."
"That's the question," Morpheus has to concede. "Was anything left of those that attacked last?"
"Icarus stabilized the crystal fragment we kept," Envoy notes. "How did you 'balance' it, Icarus?"
"That? Oh, hm. I was able to get it to vibrate fast enough that the smallest components sort of flowed like liquid. Then it was sort of like dipping my finger in it to let it use me as a new pattern to mimic," Icarus says as the orbiting parts about him swing back around to his front, then fit back together neatly. "I got the idea from a neat trick my cousins showed me. You can make water get colder than ice, you know? Just add salt. Then if you drop even a sliver of actual ice in it, it all suddenly freezes, copying the pattern it was presented with. They called it a supercooled liquid."
"I wonder if that would work with any form of Sifran crystal," Envoy notes. "I'm pretty sure they're made from crystallized quantum foam.. but the quantum wormholes would have their own vibrations.. hmm. Next experiment then, for sure! Alright, time to see if I can move a hundred times faster than normal now. Could you turn on the ultraviolet lamps so I won't be left in the dark if it works?"
Icarus puts down the tool he was playing with. He pauses there and eyes the switches, perhaps debating trying to flip them from here. But ... he decides against it and just walks over and flips them all by hand.
Envoy takes a few deep breaths. She isn't sure what the thermal effects of this might be if it works. She could run out of heat.. or boil. Inwardly, she instructs her implants, "Reduce local inertia by a factor of 100, for ten seconds of subjective time."
Envoy feels funny, but a decent sort of funny. She doesn't feel like she's on fire, about to explode, or suddenly develop a desire for Nobanakim puddings. Instead it just seems like everything around her has stopped. Well, not entirely stopped, just moving really slow from her perspective.
The ultraviolet has 'redshifted' to the visible spectrum for Envoy, leaving everything in shades of gray. She makes a note to see if Walter can create some thermal imaging goggles for her, since normal light would appear as far infrared for her. She stands up, and takes a few steps. External to the field, she only weighs a few ounces.. but she should feel normal inside.
Well, it is sort of normal. It feels like she's walking on a pile of feathers.
It takes some getting used to, but she's only got a few seconds. So she moves as fast as she feels safe towards the opposite side of the room, and makes sure to come to a complete stop before the field effect turns off.
Well, so much for it working well! Envoy runs face first into the wall, while walking! Something you can only do when you mess with things at the quantum level. Boy does her nose hurt when the effect wears off and she's back in relative-normal time.
"That ... did not look graceful. Fast,but not graceful," Morpheus helpfully comments.
"Ow," she complains, and rubs her nose. "I think I'll have to add protective gear and a portable air supply to the equipment list. Of course the wall was inside the field when I hit it.." She then feels the wall to see if there was any obvious damage to it from the inertial sheer, but doesn't expect there to be any.
Well, there is a discolored section about the size of her nose. "If you had moved yourself any faster I bet you could have vibrated yourself through it," Icarus suggests helpfully.
"And probably had bits of it still inside me when I got through to the other side," Envoy suggests. "Alright, that part worked. Now to do the exact opposite: surround something with an inertial stasis field. Was it clear to you what I did just now, Icarus?"
"Huh? Was I supposed to be watching?" Icarus has to ask.
Turning, Envoy gives the boy a look. "Are you just trying to yank my tail now?" she asks.
Icarus grins widely. Envoy then feels a yank on her tail! Granted no one is behind her, but when someone can manipulate fields ... well, remote grabbing is possible.
"Let's see you do it without hitting the wall then," Envoy instructs.
"Are you sure? Won't you feel bad if I manage it?" Icarus asks.
"No, because you'll use more energy doing it than I would," Envoy says with a big smile. "The important thing is that you are able to pick it up."
Icarus stretches his arms out, fingers interlaced to 'pop' his knuckles. By this point his phalanges are also glowing through his skin. "Right, now lets see ... the right adjustment to the locals are..." the cat hybrid mutters to himself.
The air around Icarus goes all ... wobbly. It's like seeing him through heat waves off the pavement. Within the blink of an eye he's on the other size of the room; face first, against the wall. "Ow," he tells the wall.
"I was expecting more blue," Envoy notes, and goes to check on Icarus.
Icarus is now rubbing his nose. "Wouldn't it just be easier to fold the two points together and just take one step?" he complains.
"They know that move," Envoy notes, checking for bruising. "And you overlook the other advantage: you are thinking 100 times faster. It gives you time. That's useful to me because I can cast spells. We don't know what's going to be in that underground base.. there might be many static gravity fields just for fouling up that sort of travel."
"We absolutely know what will be in that underground place," Icarus claims. This causes Morpheus to arch his brow.
"How do you know?" Envoy asks.
"IT will be lots of things we don't like," Icarus concludes.
Morpheus rubs his face. "He has your sense of humor," the construct complains.
"Well.. he'd better not wear it out, because I might need it back someday," Envoy says, crossing her arms. "We both need to practice using this inertial dampening trick more. Now, Icarus.. how would go about turning a gravity bubble - even one made of noodles and wet towels - into a quantum-gradient stasis field? That is, one where internal inertia is infinite, such that the whole thing becomes a single virtual quantum particle?"
"That would, oh, hm," Icarus says as his brow does a dance. "I'm ... not quite sure. The energy required could be huge, that's the problem but ... Well, I think Morpheus' suggestion might work here too, you need to get constructive harmonics working that keep multiplying the applied fields of inertia. So, you get the field going, then you tweak the boundaries until you find the harmonics. And keep adjusting if they change. It'll be hard."
Envoy grins. "That's one way of doing it, true," she notes. "But what is the practical effect of infinite inertia? It means that time stops. Time is also part of space though. Can you trick space into freezing time?"
"Well, if you warp space enough around something you can effectively take it out of the current effective fields. A hole," Icarus suggests. "Then if there is no space for the item, it by definition has no time either."
"What if you want it back though?" Envoy asks. "Say I want to make sure Walter is around for my 1000th birthday. I want to lock him into stasis, then bring him out, so for him no time has passed. Think small. The really small bits of spacetime, where it looks pixelated and you get little closed-loop dimensions. Big gravity will let you eat space and time in a singularity - but what I want involves quantum gravity."
Icarus rubs his forehead. "I don't know if I can affect things on that small of a scale. At least not effectively. I mean, maybe?" he flounders. "I know what's in my head is supposed to manipulate at that level but I don't know how to do it. It isn't like I have a manual for it. I can see the forms, but I don't know the right equations. Like looking at a map in a language you don't know. I'm ... sorry."
"The ship might," Morpheus notes.
"You already told me how to do it earlier," Envoy explains. "With the crystal. Only this time, instead of quanta of matter or quanta of space, you do it with quanta of time. Spacetime decouples when it gets really small. Chunky! If you could get all the quanta to line up and act together though, then it becomes one big quanta. Just like with recrystalizing.." She pauses and looks to Morpheus. "The gateways must use stasis effects to keep the event horizons stable, don't they? So.. maybe the ship would know."
"Well, simpler than that, the ship was the source for what he was built around," Morpheus notes, "It would have to have schematics for it; or some sort of operator manual. And that would note how to keep things stable. In theory anyway."
"And also how to use energy more efficiently," Envoy suggests. "It was powered by that little evil powerplant. It's certainly worth checking out. The drone might help."
"Or it might try to rip my head apart to get the parts," Icarus notes uncomfortably. "I don't like thinking about that I'm made of a mish-mash of parts. It makes me feel ... less."
"You aren't made of parts, you're made of you," Envoy says, and pats Icarus on the head. "You evolved. We just have to keep it from trying to give you a horn again."
"You can say that, but I know I shouldn't exist," Icarus notes, "My own fathe ... the donor of much of my basics, would have done anything to destroy me." He waves a hand about the room everyone stands in, "And those here don't treat me like it, but ... I'm the only me. I don't really fit in anywhere. Even you can make other that look like you. I just ... it is hard sometimes."
"You haven't met a lot of people yet," Envoy says. "Things are lot less homogenous on Sinai. Especially the Jingai. It's just that you're at a point in your development were these feelings happen. Everyone goes through them.. Well, most everyone. I've never been through puberty. I think it might just be starting for me."
"I've seen those moving picture things with Violette," Icarus notes, "And how people like me that can ... do things become either manipulated, or hunted. Does that not happen? There even was this one story about these beings called Gods using one person for a plaything and tricking her into all sorts of bad decisions."
"That.. almost never happens," Envoy says, not wanting to think about how close to home that last one hit. "Look at Violette, Icarus. She can do magic. Lots of people can. And you know what they do with it? It becomes their job. Incredible supernatural powers.. and a lot of them work on farms, or in hospitals, or provide air conditioning for parties. Nobody is out to control them, or manipulate them.. they can usually get what they want by just paying the guild rates for their time. Abaddon is a world that is very harsh, where people like us would be seen as weapons, because this world breeds weapons, biological and mechanical. This isn't the only world though, and you aren't trapped here."
"So you're saying I would be seen as no different from any of those mages?" Icarus asks plainly. "Even Violette who hasn't seen me do much knows I'm ... different. I trust her, but ... I know I can't trust everyone. I worry that I won't be allowed to be me. That ... well, what my creator wants me to be, just a thing to use."
"I was created to be.. well, a mindless extension," Envoy says. "No different from your finger. But look at me now! The.. most notorious mage alive.. apparently. You don't know where life will take you, Icarus. You'll decide along the way where you want to go and what you want to be. And yes, Violette knows you're different.. and other mages would too.. but to everyone else, you won't see that strange. You aren't a giant walking bug, or a person made from random parts of other species, or anything very freaky at all."
Icarus holds up his hand and every bone inside it can be seen in rotating shades of blues, greens, and purples. His brow arches.
"You may get invited to lots of parties," Envoy concedes.
"It's just ... I've heard people talk. Those stories and such. They all make it sound like it would be so neat to be different. But ... it's really just lonely," Icarus admits. He turns to face the wall. "Sorry, I'm tired of being attacked or friends being attacked because they want this ... thing," he mutters.
"It isn't your fault, Icarus," Envoy says, and hugs the boy. "We'll put an end to Viktor von Bronson's annoying attacks, and then it's just a few gods and the Sifras to deal with, but I have a plan for those."
"I hope so. It is just ... sometimes I want to feel normal, and I don't even know what that is," Icarus admits. "I just know I'm not."
"If it helps you are more 'normal' than either myself or Envoy," Morpheus notes. "I know it likely does not make it any easier/ If you want, I could let you experience the dreams of 'normal' people. So you can see that everyone feels the same."
"If you were normal, we'd have never met," Envoy notes. "That might help, Morpheus. Everyone feels alone sometimes, but it's never really the case. There are lots of people just like you. Maybe not physically, but in most other ways. And you can always just stand next to me. I make everyone else look normal."
"Except the Nobanakim," Morpheus points out. "Such as your adopted father."
"I've passed for Nohbakim," Envoy says. "I don't find anything strange about Barabbas."
Morpheus arches his brow. "I'm a planet and I find him strange," the construct points out.
"I wanted to be a planet once," Envoy says, then narrows her eyes at Morpheus. "So stop rubbing it in, please. Normal is a statistical phantom. Strange at least is real."
"Being a planet is over-rated," Morpheus counters, "At least you could escape a celestial body going supernova."
"The trick is to manage the fusion reactions," Envoy says. "If you do it right, you can turn the sun into a thermonuclear ramjet rocket, and.. travel around.. just taking the solar system with you."
"Theoretical pipe dream," Morpheus states. Icarus coughs and reminds, "Evil crazy guy building zombie weapons.."
"Right.. right," Envoy says. "So, wanna go talk to your other parent, Icarus?"
"Which other parent?" Icarus asks.
"The Sifran ship that was the source of your Node," Envoy says. "I'm going to call it Bucephalus."
"Gesundheit," Morpheus says and smiles. "I suppose we should go there, yes. And if you give permission, I can arrange a shared dream with Barabbas again. That is, if you wish it. It would be good for Icarus to find family connections so to speak."
"I'd like that, Morpheus," Envoy says, feeling a bit cheered up. Of course, the Sifran ship is still technically an enemy, it just doesn't know that Envoy is opposing its masters. If I can tame Bucephalus, then I know I can beat the Tribunal, she thinks.